Release of 1985 Race Riots Memo Prompts Apology From Cameron Aide

LONDON — The annual release of 30-year-old government papers in Britain produced significant embarrassment on Wednesday for one of Prime Minister David Cameron’s most senior officials, who found himself facing calls to resign over comments he made in 1985 about the country’s black population.

At the time, the official, Oliver Letwin, was a young star of the Conservative Party and a member of the policy unit of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher‘s administration.

In response to urban rioting in 1985, Mr. Letwin helped write a memo, made public by the National Archives on Wednesday, arguing that poor white people were not prone to public disorder, that the riots had been caused not by poverty or racism but by “bad moral attitudes” in black neighborhoods, and that efforts to foster black entrepreneurs would prompt them to create businesses “in the disco and drug trade.”

Mr. Letwin went on to be elected to Parliament in 1997 and now runs the cabinet office for Mr. Cameron with the grand title of chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster.

He apologized “unreservedly” for the comments in a statement on Wednesday. “I want to make clear that some parts of a private memo I wrote nearly 30 years ago were both badly worded and wrong,” he said, adding that no offense had been intended.

The statement came amid mounting criticism from senior figures in the opposition Labour Party, with Tom Watson, its deputy leader, saying the comments were evidence of “an ignorant and deeply racist view of the world.”

Chuka Umunna, a Labour member of Parliament, said that the attitudes expressed in the memo were “disgusting and appalling,” and that they ignored what he qualified as rampant racism at the time in the British police force.

The memo urged Mrs. Thatcher to ignore reports that rioting in mainly black urban areas was the result of social deprivation and racism. It also poured scorn on suggestions by senior cabinet ministers that helping blacks start businesses, refurbishing public housing and establishing training programs for low-income youth would have an ameliorating effect.

“The root of social malaise is not poor housing, or youth ‘alienation,’ or the lack of a middle class,” Mr. Letwin and Hartley Booth, who also later became a Conservative lawmaker, wrote in the document. “Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale; in the midst of the depression, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door, and expecting to see groceries there when they got back.

They continued: “Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.”

Citing the proposals of ministers in the Thatcher government, they wrote, “David Young’s new entrepreneurs will set up in the disco and drug trade; Kenneth Baker’s refurbished council blocks will decay through vandalism combined with neglect; and people will graduate from temporary training or employment programs into unemployment or crime.”

Mr. Letwin and Mr. Booth argued that the government should place “young delinquents” in “good” foster homes and should create a “youth corps” to promote “moral values” and encourage “personal responsibility, basic honesty” and respect for the law from an early age.

Mr. Booth, who lost his seat in Parliament in 1997, could not be reached for comment.

David Lammy, a Labour lawmaker who grew up in North London near the site of some of the rioting, told the BBC that unrest “had nothing to do with moral bankruptcy and everything to do with social decay and the appalling relations between black youths and the police.”

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office, speaking on the condition of anonymity in keeping with government policy, said, “We remain thoroughly committed to helping the most vulnerable and ensuring that nobody is confined by the circumstances of their birth.”

There were a few other interesting items in the release of papers by the National Archives, although documents related to notable events including the 1987 general election, the Lockerbie bombing that brought down a Pan Am flight in 1988 and a decision to ban the publication in Britain of “Spycatcher,” by a former British intelligence officer, were kept sealed.

■ Mrs. Thatcher worried that public-health advertisements warning about AIDS were too explicit about anal sex, and she checked to ensure that they did not violate the Obscene Publications Act.